Billy Bush confirms Trump Access Hollywood tape is real

Billy Bush has a message for anyone who anyone who believes Donald Trump’s recent claims that the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape — when Trump is heard saying “grab ’em by the p—y” — was fabricated.

In a Sunday column for the New York Times, the former Today co-host and Access Hollywood co-host writes how “President Trump is currently indulging in some revisionist history, reportedly telling allies, including at least one United States senator, that the voice on the tape is not his. This has hit a raw nerve in me.”

Bush confirms that Trump made crude remarks in front of him and seven other men who were present on the Access Hollywood bus in 2005. “Every single one of us assumed we were listening to a crass standup act,” Bush wrote. “He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real. We now know better.”

Bush, who was fired by NBC shortly after the Access Hollywood tape resurfaced in October 2016, admits that he and “the top brass on the 52nd floor [at NBC] had to stroke the ego” of Trump, then a “cash cow” because of his success with The Apprentice. Bush said one of the reasons he was promoted at the network was because of his keen ability to schmooze celebrities like Trump.

“None of us were guilty of knowingly enabling our future president,” Bush writes. “But all of us were guilty of sacrificing a bit of ourselves in the name of success.”